A new online storage contender: Dropbox

Digital nomads and data paranoiacs everywhere tend to be big fans of online storage, and I am no exception. I’ve been using Box.net to share large files with clients and colleagues for a long time. It’s a great service with a nice GUI, with good support for sharing files. Their service record is excellent, I’ve never had any with service outages or trouble uploading.

However, the storage limit on the basic Box.net plan is only 5 GB for $7.95 / month. They offer an upgraded plan with 15 GB, but I’m not prepared to pay $19.95 every month for a few gigabytes. I’d be happy to pay up to $10 / month, but in return I want enough storage that I can use it without worrying about running out of space. 50 gigs or more would be sufficient for that purpose.

Shopping around, I’ve found JungleDisk to be a great solution for genuine online backup. It’s based on Amazon AWS storage, and users are charged according to actual storage used. I currently store 14 gigabytes, which last month cost me a measly $3.56 for last month including transfer fees. Compared with the one-off $20 purchase of the software, this is a very reasonable option.

JungleDisk uses a desktop application for its operations, so it’s well integrated in the native file system and supports automated backup tasks. I have it set up to safeguard key folders like current projects, office documents etc. I can also access files interactively through a cached network drive, which allows me to download old projects and large media files even while travelling.

Dropbox is a new storage service that has only just come out of beta, and it looks very promising so far. It combines a dynamic web interface with a desktop application, providing the best of both worlds. The software sets up a sync’ed folder on your computer, so that editing folder structures and uploading files is as easy as copying files around your file system. Files uploaded through the web interface will be downloaded and sync’ed with the local folder.

The web interface allows you to set up file sharing with other Dropbox members. So far a few features are missing that would make it easy to share files with non-members. There is a public folder that you can use to provide public URLs to specific files, but it still lacks the important feature of sharing public folders.

According to a recent blog post Dropbox plans to offer 2 GB for free and 50 GB for $9.99 / month, or $99.99 / year. Sounds like just the right deal for my purposes. I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops. But even if I end up switching from Box.net I’ll probably keep JungleDisk for backing up larger projects.